Description of the attraction
The ancient village of Manga, located on the banks of the river of the same name, has been celebrating for more than five hundred years. It is located 12 km from the village of Pryazha. The village of Manga on the northeastern side rests on a steep hill, and on the other it is bounded by the swampy lands of the river. Therefore, the settlement has the form of a strip. Two-story houses with carved platbands lined the street. This is a typical North Karelian village. The Chapel of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary is visible from everywhere on a hill overgrown with infrequent pines and firs. It was built in the second half of the 18th century. Its appearance and size suggests that it was originally built as a church.
The low bell tower tent stands on pillars and is completed with a small dome, the 2nd dome is located on the roof of the chapel. For the chapel, the dome is clearly too large and this architectural disparity indicates that this building was built on the type of Russian churches, but later it was changed by the local population in the North Karelian style.
The chapel in Mange received recognition separately from the village itself thanks to the book by V. P. Semyonov-Tyan-Shanskiy “Russia. A complete geographical description of our fatherland”, which was published at the beginning of the twentieth century. The image of this chapel is found in guidebooks as a type of northern Karelian structure.
Thanks to research, it is possible to establish the history of the construction of this architectural monument. At the beginning, the chapel was built without a bell tower. In the first half of the 19th century, it underwent a thorough reconstruction. The porch was turned into a canopy. The north porch was dismantled and the outside of the gallery was sheathed with planks, at the same time a door was built into the vestibule at the entrance from the south porch. Apparently, a belfry was added at the same time.
The building was also renovated in the second half of the 19th century. The usual roof was replaced with a straight cut board. The senses inside and the whole structure outside were also sheathed with planks. The doorposts of the windows above and the lower cornices of the bell tower were made in the form of an onion shape. The whole building was painted, the crosses were covered with iron sheets. The type of the iconostasis was changed, if earlier the icons were simply inserted into the grooves in the hewn logs - the tyablovy type, then after the reconstruction they began to use the iconostasis with dividing posts - the frame order type.
Structurally, the chapel has a traditional look for this building - it is a higher rectangular part of the temple, and an adjoining log house with a refectory and a passage, covered with a common gable roof with a cupola. The frame of the chapel is made according to the type most often used in villages - "in a cup". The roof over the main, prayer part is covered with a red plank with rounded ends. Above the porches and the refectory, the roof was made traditionally for the wooden architecture of the Russian North by the nailless method using "chickens" - the rhizomes of young trees and "streams" - special stops. The walls inside are hewn without rounding the corners. The foundation is made of natural stone.
The ridge log of the chapel and the refectory is decorated with a comb carved from repeating triangles. Along the triangular edge of the roof gable there are carved boards - moorings. The domes of the chapel have a bulbous shape and are covered with a ploughshare in the form of triangular scales, the windows are arched and decorated with a carved profiled cornice.
The interior of the chapel has been largely lost. In the refectory, benches installed along the walls, decorated with figured balusters and a carved border, have been preserved. On one wall there was a part of the tyabla, with a plant pattern. Near the windows in the chapel, there are kliros, with a fence decorated with vertical bars.
Earlier, the chapel possessed two ancient icons "The Signs" and "Nicholas the Wonderworker", which were transferred in 1957 to the Russian Museum. The size of the icons is 60 x 70 cm. By the type of writing, they could have been painted in the icon-painting workshop of Novgorod and were probably transported to this region in the 16th century.
The chapel is currently not operational, it was restored in 1970, in 1987-1988 the wall cladding was removed. The building is 14.2 m long and 6.46 m wide.
